Why do the N.Y. Times tech guys insist on using titles and reducing the video image and forcing it over to the left margin? Just offer the video in the style of YouTube or Vimeo and let it go at that.
David Gordon Green‘s Your Highness (Universal, 4.8) is so poorly written, so uninvested in genuine stoner humor (a la The Big Lebowski and Wonder Boys), and so appallingly unsuccessful that it’s a bit of a challenge to accurately describe it. But it’s definitely not funny — that you can take to the bank.
I’m not exaggerating in calling this a landmark in the annals of crapitude and dick jokes and the fine corporate art of farting in the audience’s face. It’s easily one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my life. But I stayed to the end! And I’m almost proud of this because everything in my mind was saying “go…escape…free yourself!”
Your Highness is a mixture of a kind of 12th Century, Lord of the Rings/Robin Hood-y backdrop atmosphere, showoff CG and action scenes with eye-filling cinematography and a full-blast orchestral score, a completely moronic and non-cohesive genre-spoof story with — this is the core marketing element — unregenerate pig-slob-lameass-burp-stoner dialogue and attitudes as performed by Danny McBride, whose dirtbag prince character, Thadeous, can be seen as a kind of time-travelling emissary from degraded 21st Century culture.
Thadeous is a boorish, unrefined, masturbating, overweight slob forced by his king father (Charles Dance) to accompany his heroic, big-hearted brother Fabious (James Franco) on a quest to save Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), fiancee of Fabious, from the clutches of Leezar (Justin Theroux), a standard-issue demonic wizard who’s kidnapped her and who poses a general threat, etc. Natalie Portman is some kind of wandering samurai bow-and-arrow girl who jumps into the story in Act Two.
It’s one of those inert exercises in ironic distance — another SNL skit stretched to feature length and amplified, wide-screened and CG’ed to a fare-thee-well. “We’re just kidding, nobody’s in this stupid thing, we’re all getting paid,” etc. At best the crowd at last night’s Arclight screening was smirking and tittering now and then. There were no laughs to speak of and for damn sure no belly laughs.
Take out the oppressive action scenes and nudity titillation and production values that Universal execs probably insisted upon — the CG, costumes, eye-filling landscapes, sweeping score, etc. — and you’re left with a dopey story that’s basically about a selfish low-life swearing and dick-joking his way through a series of unconnected sketches about supernatural threats that aren’t even fake-real, and nothing that anyone (in the film or the audience) really cares about.
Question: If Theroux and his three old-witch allies have the power to throw electric flash-bolts at their adversaries and throw them against walls and knock them cold, why don’t they have the power to slice their heads off? Or change them into farm animals? Or wound them so badly so they’re left unconscious, or can’t do anything except lie on the ground and groan? We all know the answer, and I think we’re all sick of these rules.
There’s one bit — one! — that I half-smirked at. It’s performed by Theroux and involves the fate of a tiny Tinkerbell-like fairy. That’s all I’m going to say.
I was 90% delighted with Green’s Pineapple Express, but this thing is a disaster. Green is a longtime pally of McBride’s, who wrote the script with Ben Best, and their friendship (along with the stunning cluelessness of Universal executives) is apparently the key reason why audiences will be grappling with Your Highness this weekend.
Has there ever been a more radical transformation…corruption, I mean, in the style and tone of a once-respected director than what has happened with Green? Some day the New Beverly Cinema will show a double bill of Your Highness and George Washington, Green’s small-scale 2000 film that struck almost everyone as being Terrence Malick-y. And the people that experience that double-bill are going to come out staggering and saying, “What kind of sell-out kool-aid did Green drink?”
Michael Fleming‘s 4.4 interview with civil-rights activist and Martin Luther King confidante Andrew Young, posted last night, is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on Deadline.com — a thoughtful, highly revealing discussion with a respected, well-meaning historical figure who’s nonetheless an apparent obstructionist-in-denial when it comes to two proposed MLK biopics — Scott Rudin and Paul Greengrass‘s Memphis and Lee Daniels’ Selma.
Fleming reported last Friday that Universal Pictures had scuttled Memphis after Young and “the King estate” applied pressure. Young confirmed to Fleming in the interview that he did indeed contact Universal and objected to a Memphis script draft that, among other things, depicted marital infidelity in Dr. King’s final days. Fleming also learned that Young was told by Universal that “it would not move forward with Memphis in response to his claims of factual inaccuracies.” A studio spokesperson told Fleming that Universal’s decision was “based on scheduling.”
“Young is admittedly protective of the reputation of his close friend,” Fleming writes, “and said he pines for someone to do for King what Richard Attenborough did for Gandhi.” Young tells Fleming that when he read the script for Memphis, “I thought it was fiction.” As for the depiction of infidelity, Young says: “There is testimony in congressional hearings that a lot of that information was manufactured by the FBI and wasn’t true. The FBI testified to that.”
Listen to what Young is saying here — “a lot” of the FBI information about King’s extra-marital trysts is possibly bogus, but not all of it.
“My only concern here is honoring the message of Martin Luther King’s life, and how you can change the world without killing anybody,” Young explains. “You’ve seen glimpses of that in the fall of the Berlin Wall, in Poland, South Africa, in a movement in Egypt that began with prayers, where even mercenaries and the most brutal soldiers have trouble shooting someone on their knees. These regimes crumbled before non-violent demonstrations, and that is a message the world needs.”
Fleming suggests that “when films canonize subjects, audiences can sense it, and that is why good biopics mix reverence with warts-and-all treatment.” Young replies: “It’s not wrong if the warts are there. But we had the most powerful and understanding wives in history, Coretta, my wife Jean, and Ralph Abernathy‘s wife Juanita. These women were more dedicated and enthusiastic in pushing us into these struggles than anybody, and the inference Coretta might have been upset about Martin being gone so much or them having marital troubles, it’s just not true.”
Listen again — Young isn’t addressing the accuracy of the allegations about King’s poon appetites, or asserting that King’s wife was or wasn’t aware of same. But to suggest that the late Coretta Scott King might not have been upset if (I say “if”) she was aware of her husband’s alleged extra-marital activities, or that she may have been “understanding” in this regard, is flat-out absurd.
Young tells Fleming “he offered input” on Memphis but hasn’t heard back. “I said I would pay my own way to LA to sit with the writers, tell what really went on, and give them names, but nobody took me up on it,'” he says. It would a respectful gesture for any MLK biopic filmmaker to consult with Young, but given the levels of Young’s denial about King and his commitment to hagiography in defiance of reported fact, what self-respecting creative would want to go there?
“Great screen comedies that feature a severed Minotaur’s penis as a key prop are, sadly, few and far between,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt (who attended the same screening earlier this evening that I did). “Your Highness aspires to such greatness but falls instead into a deep chasm of such comic lowness after less than five minutes that it’s unable to extricate itself. Things get so bad you half expect a cameo by Nicolas Cage.
“The surprises here are twofold: One is that David Gordon Green, whose early films such as George Washington and All the Real Girls showed genuine promise, agreed to direct. The other is that Green and producer Scott Stuber assembled such a talented cast for such a feeble script. The result is like watching an All-Star basketball game where everyone throws up bricks. Box office should be an air ball.
“Mel Brooks used to do things like this in his sleep — you know, a spoof of a genre movie, in this case, of a medieval fantasy-adventure — and, of course, the Monty Python comedy troupe mastered the art form. But Green is tone-deaf to comedy, so he is seriously misled by longtime buddy and collaborator Danny McBride, who co-wrote and co-produced this ‘twisted tale’ in which he himself would star. There is little worse in the movie world than a spoof that falls flat on its over-costumed butt, but that’s what you get with Your Highness.
“In a fantasy world strikingly well imaged by rugged Northern Irish landscapes, a savvy set design and overabundance of digital effects, the movie’s human characters meander in an indifferent quest that devolves into a contest to see who can be the worst potty-mouth. So for every f–k, a– and b–v-r uttered, the movie spends a fortune in miniatures, sets, creatures, costumes and razzle-dazzle. Wouldn’t you know the only visual effect most male viewers are likely to remember are the semi-naked women with sandy paint all over their eye-catching bodies. It would appear no digital effects were involved.
“It’s hard to locate the joke the filmmakers even think they’re telling. McBride’s character is a dope-smoking masturbator wandering through an absurd world making lame, anachronistic wisecracks, but nothing here is the least bit funny. Or rather it earns laughs only in the pathetic sense. The only excuse for the film’s existence is a misguided act of friendship in the case of Green and McBride and for everyone else a paycheck.”
The new Film Society of Lincoln Center movie theatre on West 65th that nobody will ever remember the name of is opening on June 17th. With presumably state-of-the-art digital sound and projection, and a very fine doc — Andrew Rossi‘s Page One: Inside the N.Y. Times — kicking things off. The smallish twin cinema is being called the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (presumably because Elinor Bunin Munroe made a big contribution to the construction fund). It should be called Film65 or something like that…c’mon.
Rose Kuo, executive director, and Richard Pena, program director, in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s new theatre.
Noting that the theatre’s only competition is the nearby Lincoln Plaza Cinemas complex, on Broadway between 62nd and 63rd Streets, N.Y. Times reporter Larry Talbot quotes film society staff members as saying that “their new venture would complement, rather than compete with, Lincoln Plaza.” Film Society of Lincoln Center program director Richard Pena also claims that “we are not looking to upstage what Dan Talbot does, and in a sense we are building on that….there are many worthy films Dan simply can’t get to even with six screens, films for which we might be able to provide the difference.”
Well, maybe…but I’ve always avoided the Lincoln Plaza and its stuffy, bowling alley-like theatres with too many seats and barely audible sound like the plague. I saw The Ghost Writer at a screening room and loved it, and then dragged Jett to see it at the Lincoln Plaza…and the overall experience was at least 30% or 40% diminished. So if I’m in the area some rainy day and it’s a coin toss about which theatre to attend because they’re both showing good films…no contest.
“Hesher is not shit — it has its own vision and personality and delivers a form of anarchic-idiot behavior that I’ve never quite seen or contemplated before,” I wrote on 3.16. “And it does have a startling, amusing-at-times Joseph Gordon Levitt performance as a hair-trigger hippie Rasputin slash animal-house provocateur. And a very fierce and touching one from the tweener-aged Devin Brochu.
“And there’s some nicely twisted humor going on in the story of Levitt moving uninvited into Brochu’s San Fernando Valley home and gradually rousing him and his depressed dad (Rainn Wilson) out of a stupor-like depression over the death of Brochu’s mom. But Levitt’s numerous provocations seem to be more about fart-lighting improv and acting on whatever extreme-scuzzball instinct has popped into his (or Susser’s) head. It all kinda sorta of pays off at the end, but you have to endure a motherlode of WTF? consternation before this finally happens.
“I also enjoyed/respected the performances by Natalie Portman, a financially struggling checkout girl whom Brochu befriends, and Piper Laurie, playing Brochu’s ailing grandmother and,as it turns out, the one character who seems to “get” Hesher/Levitt most of all. And Wilson’s catatonic dad (who delivers an agonized-crying scene reminiscent of moments in Super) feels like truth every moment he’s on-screen.”
You’d never know it from the website’s front page, but Hesher opens on May 13th.
The Hollywood track record of producer Jerry Weintraub, the focus of an HBO doc airing tonight called My Way, is nothing to crow about. Out of 46 films he’s produced since the mid ’60s, three could be called good — William Friedkin‘s Cruising, Jean-Claude Tramont‘s All Night Long, and Barry Levinson‘s Diner.
Yes, Weintraub exec produced Robert Altman‘s Nashville, but he was probably just a money guy and had zilch to do with content. The other 40 or so (obviously excluding the future projects) have been more or less mulch. Yes, I’m including Oh, God! in that group.
I’m presuming that Steven Soderbergh‘s Liberace, which Weintraub is producing with Michael Douglas in the title role, is going to be an exceptional biopic, but even if you count that Weintraub’s good film tally is still 4 out of 46.
My impression of him over the years is that his colorful career and personality are a lot more interesting than what he’s put on the screen. I’m presuming that the doc realizes this and won’t try to tribute Weintraub for being anything more than a big operator with the gift of gab who’s gotten around and rubbed shoulders with legends for the last 50 years and made a lot of dough first and foremost — a guy who talks it a little bit better than he walks it.
We’ve all had this feeling, I think, that Weintraub, who started in the music business, “knows guys who know guys,” if you catch my drift.
I love this Weintraub quote, taken from a Movieline story: “I know so many people in the world [and] have a very big phone book and a very long reach around the world. And I think — I don’t think, I know — that 95 percent of the people who I know who weren’t born into success who have become successful and done things that are different and made a lot of money and had a lot of excitement in their life are people who never hear the word ‘no.‘”
A friend feels “it’s funny how My Way producer and Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter did a serious takedown of Weintraub while at Spy, but now sucks up and makes an HBO documentary about him.”
I’ve never had four remotes before. Left to right: the 50″ Vizio plasma remote, the Time Warner cable remote, the Samsung Bluray remote and an iLive remote for an external sound bar I bought last weekend for $130 or thereabouts — adds agreeable bass and sharpness and much-needed volume when watching Blurays.
The just-released official poster for the 64th Cannes Film Festival sounds a familiar note in certain circles. “That ’70s vibe will never be with us again so let’s look backward”…right? Obviously a sultry and highly glamorous image of Faye Dunaway, of course, taken when she was about 30.
It was snapped during the shooting or promotion for Jerry Schatzberg‘s Puzzle of a Downfall Child (’70), which didn’t play all that well for me when I saw it in the ’90s. It’s an impressionistic time-shifty mood piece about a depressed and half-suicidal model turned actress, but it feels too scattered — it never settles in.
Could big-name actors and actresses of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s have made it in subsequent decades? Would Cary Grant or Gary Cooper or Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn would have been as big in movies if they’d been born, say, in 1950 or thereabouts? Would their temperaments and acting styles have meshed with the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and afterwards, or were “Cary Grant,” “Cary Cooper,” “Bette Davis” and “Katharine Hepburn” manifestations and brands that could only have been shaped and refined and taken flight in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s?
And what about the reverse? Could Reese Witherspoon or Adam Sandler or Owen Wilson or Seth Rogen have found some level of success in the old studio system?
The general across-the-board answer is no — old-time movie stars were obviously looser and more natural and low-key charismatic than theatrical actors of the early 20th and 19th Century, but there was also something classic and iconic about their personas as they acted in those often sentimental and sometimes dishonest big-studio programmers, and they were shaped by much tougher childhood experiences than actors of today. So it’s hard to imagine most of them fitting into today’s movie world. They’d be regarded as odd ducks who don’t get it.
And today’s better actors have the liberty of appearing in films that are far less pretentious and more-or-less realistically mannered, and are certainly less hokey than a good portion of the big-studio films, so it’s hard to imagine them fitting into the occasionally cornball dream-movie realms as envisioned and maintained by big-studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Samuel Goldwyn and Jack L. Warner. Plus dashing profiles and polished smoothie personas were much more valued (and prevalent) in the old days than today.
I could imagine Montgomery Clift fitting right into today’s realm, no problem. Or that of the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s. And young Marlon Brando, for sure. Grace Kelly, my lifelong concept of an eternal 10, could have easily made it in our world. All drop-dead beautiful actors with earnest conviction would have a shot in any time period, I would think.
But most actors are specific creations and reflections of the times they were brought up in and had to struggle in during their breaking-in period, particularly character actors. Rudolph Valentino would be a joke in 2011. He’d never make it.
Robert Towne (Chinatown, The Last Detail, The Firm) being hired to write a Sony miniseries based on Robert Harris‘s “Pompeii” — the same property that Roman Polanski tried to adapt into a feature only to abandon in ’07 — is an okay thing and a mildly interesting move. Because one might speculate that the Chinatown-resembling elements in Harris’s story had a bit to do with Towne’s involvement.
The main protagonist is Marcus Attilius Primus, a Roman engineer in the mold of Charlton Heston‘s character in Earthquake — a willful and sympathetic character with professional responsibilities. He rushes down from Rome to the Bay of Napoli to repair a damaged aqueduct, the Aqua Augusta, only to meet and fall for Corelia, described in an Amazon summary as “the defiant daughter of a vile real-estate speculator” a la Evelyn Cross Mulray and Noah Cross.
Down the road Corelia supplies Marcus “with documents implicating her father and Attilius’s predecessor in a water embezzlement scheme.” I’m not making this up!
All disaster movies are obliged to follow the same plot scheme. Acquaint the audience with a community of characters — some admirable, some villainous, some marginal — in Act One, while supplying indications and warnings of the disaster yet to come. The disaster occurs sometime during Act Two (or at the beginning of Act Three), and thereby shows what the key characters are made of. The pure logistical spectacle of the disaster occupies a good 15 or 20-minute span. And then the sorrow, the cleanup and the final resolution.
“All of us I think, have fantasies about living in the past and Pompeii uniquely allows you to indulge that fantasy,” Towne was quoted saying by Variety. “The Harris book tells a compelling story with contemporary relevance. If you want an idea of what it was like to live life back then, ‘Pompeii’ is it.”
Not taken by yours truly during my May 2007 visit to Pompeii.
Exec producer Ridley Scott said Towne would “bring his trademark vision to this remarkable project. In portraying an historical world on the brink of destruction, he will no doubt capture and engage audiences globally. His adaptation will truly make for an astonishing television event.”
I only ask that Scott and Sony spend the extra time to make the CG as fine and exacting as possible, and that Towne supply as much detail as he can about the minutiae of Italian life in A.D. 79. I say this as someone who visited Pompeii four years ago.
When he bailed on his Pompeii project Polanski said he had “put a lot of work and energy into [it] so it is not without regret that I have to decline my further involvement.” If I were Towne I’d be all over Polanski’s script and research, and urging Scott and Sony to compensate Polanski and give some kind of screen credit for creative input or whatever.
Polanski reportedly wanted Orlando Bloom, an actor whose career has been all but dead since the debacle of Elizabethtown and the underwhelming response to Kingdom of Heaven, to play Marcus Primus, and Scarlett Johansson was web-rumored to be interested in (or being sought for) the Corelia part.
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